There is a scene that is worth imagining, it is 1990 and Marco Masini goes on stage at Sanremo with Desperatesings of loneliness, of men who do not know how to love, of pain that cannot find words. The public looks at him with a mixture of discomfort and fascination, but the critics turn up their noses. Some find it too much, too dark, too naked, too true. Yet it sells.
Advance the tape thirty-five years, it’s 2026 and Fedez gets on a stage – or more often on a screen – and talks about scars, about hotels where you hit rock bottom, about fathers who become alibis. The audience applauds, comments, gives him what is called today engagement and it was once called, more simply, attention.
Necessary evilthe song with which the two artists arrive together at Sanremo 2026, is a document on how the way in which Italy – and not only Italy – consumes, metabolizes and monetizes pain has changed.
Masini: pain as a subversive act
To understand what Masini represents in this story we must go back to an era in which Italian pop music was still fundamentally optimistic by contract. The Eighties had bequeathed a certain idea of song as a space of lightness, of escape, of consolatory beauty. Masini arrived like a punch, he didn’t sing love stories that ended badly; sang the profound structure of the emotional failure of Italian men. He sang Fuck youand it wasn’t a playful provocation: it was an x-ray.
In that context, bringing pain on stage was an act that cost something. It cost the label of “sad singer”, the distrust of radio programmers, the suspicion that behind so much darkness there was something unhealthy. The market had not yet learned to sell male vulnerability as a product. And so Masini, at least in part, carried it despite the market.
This doesn’t mean Masini was a commercial martyr — he sold millions of records, he won Sanremo, he had a long and solid career. However, it means that his pain had a cost of authenticity which was also a real cost: he risked something every time he went up on that stage and laid himself bare.
Fedez: pain as a format
Fedez is a different phenomenon, and it would be intellectually dishonest not to recognize it. He is one of the most capable Italian artists of his generation in reading the mechanisms of consensus and positioning himself exactly where the public is ready to receive it. This is a skill, but it is a skill that has also transformed the way pain functions in its narrative.
In recent years Fedez has gone through objectively difficult events: a serious illness, a public separation, an existential crisis documented step by step on social media. He cried in front of the cameras, talked about his therapies, shared diagnoses, hospitalizations, moments of deep darkness, due to depression and the use of psychotropic drugs. And all of this — all of it — happened in a space where the boundary between the life lived and the content produced is structurally porous.
We do not want to establish whether Fedez’s pain is true or false, nor compare them as pain. It’s about understanding that that pain, the moment it is shared on Instagram or transformed into a text for Sanremo, enters a system of value production that Masini simply did not have at his disposal in the 1990s.
Masini’s pain became a record every two years, Fedez’s pain becomes content in real time, feeds the algorithm, generates conversation, builds serial narratives that keep the public hooked like a TV series.
The song: where the two worlds meet (and challenge each other)
Necessary evil it is a text written by many hands – FL Lucia, Masini, Abbate, La Cava, Iammarino, Lazzarin – and you can feel it. There is an internal tension in the song which is also the tension of the project itself: two languages of pain trying to find a common syntax.
Masini’s verses have his unmistakable signature: the concrete metaphor, the physical image of the collapse (hitting rock bottom in a hotel room), the paradoxical construction (from the silence which is a noise). They are verses that could easily fit in We would need the sea or in You’ll fall in love. They have that artisanal quality, that slow workmanship that belongs to those who learned to write before social media existed.
The lines attributable to Fedez’s voice – or at least those that resonate in his communicative grammar – are more direct, more exposed, more immediately readable: prudish people judge / what bad people hang out with Fedez / but we always forget that Judas / had sex with good people.
The phrase that Masini chooses to explain the meaning of the song —
we must have courage and we cannot lose hope, especially in times of great endurance
it sounds like a poetic declaration that belongs entirely to his vision of the world. It is the vision of someone who has gone through the darkness without an audience to watch him live. It is the vision of someone who knows what endurance is because he had no alternative to endurance.
The real question: have we changed or has the market changed?
The answer, of course, is both, but in different proportions than we tend to believe.
The market has changed in a radical and documentable way, male vulnerability has become a desirable product. Podcasts in which we confess, almost as if they were therapy, top the charts, pop psychology books fill the charts. The mental health awareness it became a hashtag and then a communication style and then an industry. In this ecosystem, talking about one’s pain is no longer an act that costs something: it is an act that pays off. Not in an exclusively cynical sense — it also resonates emotionally, even socially, even in terms of genuinely connecting with the audience. But it also pays off economically, and this cannot be overlooked.
The public, for its part, has developed a relationship with the suffering of others that is honestly more open than thirty years ago, but also more consumerist. We are more willing to welcome the fragility of others, and it is real progress. But we also welcome it faster, we digest it faster, we forget it sooner. Masini’s pain in the nineties left a mark because it was rare, because it broke something, because you had to make do with it until the next album came out.
The real question is that Necessary evil poses — involuntarily, perhaps, or perhaps not — is this: when the market learns to absorb and monetize pain, does pain itself change? Does it lose something of its original function, which was to break the silence, to say the unspeakable, to cost something to those who carried it and those who listened to it?
It would be easy to close this reasoning with a clear judgement: Masini authentic, Fedez performative, but it would be wrong.
Fedez led a generation of thirty-year-olds to talk about mental health in a way that no singer-songwriter of the nineties could have done, simply because he didn’t have the tools and cultural context to do so. It has normalized the public crying of men in a country where men still cry too little and too much in secret. He used his platform — however built on the algorithm, however inevitably mixed with brand strategy — to tell millions of people that hitting rock bottom is not the end.
And Masini, by bringing his story to this shared stage, did not sell himself short. He recognized that pain needs new vectors to reach those who would never listen to his song alone.
Necessary evilthen, is not just the title of a song, it is also the evil of compromise, of the contamination between different languages, of the choice to be on a stage where the logics of the market and those of art mix shamelessly. Maybe it’s the only way authentic pain can still find its way to someone, in a world that produces emotional content like a factory produces cars.
The difference between Masini and Fedez is not the truth of pain. It’s the speed with which it must become public, and that speed, for better or worse, tells us more about us than any text could.
“It took me forever to feel alive / following the thin line of a thread.” Masini could have written it thirty years ago. Fedez could have posted it yesterday.
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